“Britain is on course to adopt gay marriage after the House of Commons voted to give the marriage (same sex couples) bill a second reading by a majority of 225. The bill will still have to receive line-by-line scrutiny in the Commons, and then it will have to get through the Lords, but the size of the majority, and the fact that the leaders of all three main parties are in favour, suggest that it is now inevitable that gay marriage will become law.” [Guardian UK]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKWJSKYBDXE

In this heartwarming video from North Korea, a young man dreams of taking a rocket to a Space Shuttle, gently flying around the Earth, then bombing the shit out of America.

North Korea video shows US city in flames after missile attack [Guardian UK]

Update: Well, that didn’t last long. Global scofflaw North Korea apparently lifted the elevator soundtrack of “We Are The World” from an Activision game. The silent version isn’t nearly as much fun.

Someone just told me there was fighting going on in the NOLA Superdome. #shocked

— Michael D Brown (@MichaelBrownUSA) February 4, 2013

Power out? No problem. twitter.com/Oreo/status/29…

— Oreo Cookie (@Oreo) February 4, 2013

Dead Paul Harvey is one thing, but by general acclamation Oreos won the night.

Title: “The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics”

Authors: Leonard Susskind and George Hrabovsky

Rank: 44

Blurb: “A book for anyone who has ever regretted not taking physics in college.”

Review: “NOT a ‘popular’ physics book with a bunch of fluffy, non substantial speculation about membranes, strings, fractals, superpositioned states and multiple universes! Has real, tough, solid content with a LOT of advanced formulas, including tensors and many partial derivatives… There also is an appendix on Central Forces and Planetary Orbits and ‘math interludes’ on Trig, Vectors, Integrals and PDE’s.”

Customers Also Bought: “Fighting Chess: Move by Move”

Footnote: Now that you mention it, we’ve never regretted not taking physics in college.

The Theoretical Minimum [Amazon]

Buy or Die [Stinque@Amazon Kickback Link]

You won’t move forward if you keep letting things from your past bring you down! God forgave you!

— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) February 1, 2013

Our guest columnist has not been known to cook his rival’s parents into chili.

Correction: January 28, 2013

An earlier version of this column misstated a plot point in “South Park.” While the character Kenny was once killed in every episode, that is no longer the case. The earlier version also misstated the circumstances of his repeated deaths. While he has met his fate in a variety of ways over the years, he was not routinely “ritually sacrificed.”

Fortifying the Empire ‘South Park’ Built [NYT]